A key focus of social selling is to engage with your Leads on subjects that are of interest to them (rather than what you are offering them). There are however another set of people that you should work just as hard to engage with that aren’t leads, they are Thought LEADers.

You are highly unlikely to do business with these people but they could be the key to unlocking the most difficult Leads.

Building relationships with thought leaders can pay off big time. Your Leads will see you as more credible, you will have your finger on the pulse regarding topics that are important to your Leads and this will also help you write better, more relevant content. If you do this really well, you might even find that your Leads are chasing you rather than the other way around!

Three Critical Questions

If you are in a sales role or you are hoping to win new customers on LinkedIn then can you answer the following questions;

What business subjects are important to your Leads? Who are the thought leaders in these subjects? Where do these thought leaders actively post and engage online? You can answer these questions by conducting the Six Steps outlined in my published post.

Welcome to episode 129, at the end of a busy week for LinkedIn having delivered their social selling conference Sales Connect in New York. I was keenly watching the Twitter feed and some updates from people I knew were there to hear reaction to some of the big announcements made.

In this episode I’m going to dive into the 5 main announced changes to Sales Navigator. Don’t worry of you don’t have a Sales Navigator account, this could still be very relevant to you.

But before all that I spotted these interesting things in the news this week;

Reid Hoffman is so against Trump, he created a card game! LinkedIn Siri integration goes live with the launch of iOS 10 3 new LinkedIn services in India

Sales Connect 2016

I wasn’t able to make it to New York but I did the next best thing and followed on Twitter.

Various speakers talked about the exciting world of social selling including several case studies, Chris Anderson from TED talks appeared to be the most popular but I bet Malcolm Gladwell was pretty good too!

Various statistics were quoted, many I have heard before but these did grab my attention;

“Sales & Marketing are blending into one”

“Personal value has to 2X the impact over business value. 71% of B2B buyers who see personal value will purchase”

“92% of B2B buyers engage with sales professionals who are known industry thought leaders”.

“EY have 30,000 Sales Navigator licences”!!

The five really big announcements

Sales Navigator is becoming an open platform (at last!). Initial CRM partners are Oracle, SAP Hybris, SugarCRM, Hubspot and Netsuite. New search filters for Lead builder. Size of department, Senior leadership, revenue, HQ zip code, department growth and content keywords. InMail 2.0. Improvements to SN inMail allowing a compose box to the side, attachments and ‘write to CRM’ Notes & Tags. This includes the ability to filter searches by tags. Gmail extension. Very similar to Rapportive.

Welcome to episode 128, this week I want to revisit the subject of advertising.

Firstly some interesting stuff I saw this week;

A company called We are Flint interviewed just over 2000 UK adults to determine the level of social media usage. The results for LinkedIn make interesting reading;

LinkedIn Advertising

This still seems to be a thorny issue for LinkedIn with another set of less than inspiring results announced recently. In Q2 marketing revenue was $181, just 19% of their income and over 60% of this came from sponsored updates.

You may recall we covered advertising in episodes 85. 92 and 94 when listener Peter Gold experimented with LinkedIn ads. The conclusion wasn't very positive!

So I was intrigued when I came across someone who describes himself as a ‘LinkedIn ads evangelist’!

AJ kindly gave up some of his time to chat with me this week about LinkedIn ads. How they work and who should and who shouldn’t be using them. It’s a fascinating insight and finally puts to bed the question once and for all. Summary If your typical customer has a high lifetime value (tens of thousands plus) then LinkedIn ads can be very powerful (if done correctly). So it seems that, as usual LinkedIn are solely targeting large enterprises.

Does having an email address in your headline still penalise you in search results?

This questions relates to a blog post I wrote in 2014; LinkedIn Search is Changing

The answer is yes, nothing appears to have changed since that post. I have just checked this on 5 different searches and on every occasion the person who either has an email address or a telephone number in their headline or name fields comes either last or last page in a search result - even though they were active (key factor in the search algorithm) and 1st tier connections

In this episode I attempt to get my head around the millennial problem - i.e. Why don’t Millennials use LinkedIn?

Firstly though a few things I found interesting this week;

New content search on the LinkedIn app

LinkedIn Profinder expands to the whole of the US New iOS 10 launch this month will include deeper SIRI integration into LinkedIn

The Millennial Question

I read a very interesting article this week from Allen M. Quinn titled 5 Reasons Why Millenials Aren’t Using LinkedIn.

I thought this was a very interesting subject and worth further consideration. As a father of two millennials (who are both nowhere near LinkedIn!) I have a particular perspective to bring to the issue and it struck me that you might also.

I contacted the author Allen and despite viewing my profile, he didn’t come back to me - Bloody Millennials!!! To be fair, I only reached out yesterday so he may come back yet but I was unable to arrange to interview him for this episode - perhaps that might work for another episode.

I would urge to read not only the piece itself but also the comments, which include contributions from millennials and those of an older generation - it’s very interesting.

What is a Millennial? Whilst there is no definitive birth date range, Most experts state that a Millennial (formerly known as Gen Y) is someone who was born between the early 1980s to the early 2000’s so effectively they range between age 15 and 35 although I think most people think of millennials as being in their 20s.

Earlier this year LinkedIn published some analysis showing that 87 million millennials were on LinkedIn. At the time LinkedIn had 433 million users so that is 20% millennials and not the 38% quoted in Allens article.

My first point is that I am not sure that's 20% is necessarily such a bad figure. The US census of 2015 showed that millennials accounted for about 28% of the population so it could be better but it's not disastrous!

Allen details five reasons so I thought it would make sense to address each one individually.

Too many "rules"/ Too structured:

This really covered two subjects, Firstly it seems to be about etiquette with millennials being unsure about what to say and what is okay. I think this is an issue created out of being a minority rather than a millennial, if you are only 20% of any community you are bound to find it intimidating! My advice would be to encourage millennials to take more risks and not be intimidated by negative feedback. Allen states that he has witnessed someone's update getting slammed by LinkedIn users and publicly shaming that person for it but surely this happens across all social media, In fact LinkedIn is significantly “tamer" than most - have you seen Reddit?!! Millennials should aim to show humility in their posts and be open about their desire to learn more about online networking, this approach will inevitably lead to greater success. Finally I think the 80% of users who are not millennials need to show a much higher level of empathy towards this demographic.

2. It's not a "Fun" Social Media:

Isn't that what Facebook, snapchat, Instagram and twitter are for? I don't think there is anything wrong with having a bit of fun on LinkedIn but it is essentially a business network and therefore one would expect it to be less ‘light hearted’ than social networks that are focussed on your personal life. Social media doesn't have to have a singular purpose (Fun), what about; Career advancement Learning and personal development Network expansion and relationships. These are all areas of great value to millennials, even if they might be perceived as "less fun”

3. It's neither private nor exclusive. EVERYONE can see your stuff

Why does LinkedIn need to be private? As opposed to social networks that are more geared towards your personal life, LinkedIn is focused on your professional life and the biggest difference therefore is that your professional life is something that you do want people to see.

That said, If someone really does want to be more private they have settings they can adjust and in my opinion those settings are no more complicated than settings in other social networks.

4. No one to connect with:

This is a difficult one for millennials because by default they are bound to know less people but we all have to start somewhere and there is no rush to get to thousands of connections!

In the article he talks about the idea that it appears to be ‘weird’ to reach out to strangers with an invitation to connect - I couldn't agree more! It is pretty weird and millennials would be wise to not do it and that goes there every other age group as well!

5. Premium is way too expensive:

This is undeniably true, LinkedIn price their products for large enterprise sized organisations who are less cost sensitive. That said, there really is no need to upgrade your account. The jobseeker premium account is pretty much a waste of time in my opinion. Millennials can get plenty of use and value from Linkedin without having to upgrade their account.

Conclusion

Despite my comments above I do agree that there is a problem here, millennials are not using LinkedIn as much as they could and here is what I suggest could be done to resolve that;

LinkedIn could do a lot more to showcase LinkedIn to millennials, they seem far too focused on generating revenue from large corporates at the expense of their members including this cohort. Earlier this year LinkedIn produced a Millennial Playbook which was a good idea implemented very badly. When you click on the link above you'll see that you have to sign up with your email and contact details in order to receive a free copy of the playbook. This is far too restrictive and not helpful. LinkedIn need to make this a simple PDF that can be downloaded without the need to enter any information.

Video is much more user-friendly, especially for millennials so LinkedIn should produce a series of videos showcasing examples of how millennial's have had great success using LinkedIn. I would suggest they use a different company/production team though as most Millennials I know would cringe at their normal style of video! We all need to encourage millennials on LinkedIn. It is our responsibility to show more empathy and encouragement to this generation. The greater use of gamification could be very helpful. Why not show users how ‘interesting’ they are? We know the algorithm is constantly assessing our profile and activities so why not showcase this on our home page. Millennials typically respond well to gasification and it will make LinkedIn appear to be more fun. I think a mentoring programme would work exceptionally well on LinkedIn, this could be user driven via a group but it would be much more effective if it was implemented by LinkedIn. Over 35’s could volunteer to mentor a millennial and help them, not just with LinkedIn but business networking in general.